ABSTRACT
An Essay concerning Human Understanding was a late product of that amazing period in which the Aristotelian view of the natural world, under attack throughout the Renaissance, was finally overthrown and replaced by mechanistic corpuscularianism. In many respects, not only for its sheer best-selling success in advocacy, Locke's rambling, chatty, repetitive, rhetorical masterpiece deserves the seat once generally accorded it beside Newton's Principia Mathematica as the culmination of the process by which the 'new philosophy' replaced the old. It also has the considerable advantage, for the philosopher looking to learn from history, that it sets out a version of anti-dogmatic realism constructed before the onset of the idealism or conceptualism which has dominated philosophy, in one form or another, for the last two centuries. It offers us a view from a standpoint that philosophy has otherwise lost. At the same time it illustrates, perhaps more clearly than any other text, how argument between different forms of realism supplied the seedbed on which it was possible for idealism to grow.
